


But Softly At First

by Interrobang



Category: Hades (Video Game 2018)
Genre: Achilles Has Two Hands, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Multi, but the fool just walks around holding his bleeding heart in both of them instead of reaching out
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-13 12:15:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29401836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Interrobang/pseuds/Interrobang
Summary: Zagreus reminds him of Pat sovery much,is the thing: his earnestness, his open smile, even the initial clumsiness the godling displays when they first begin their training. It brings Achilles back to his and Pat’s days on the mountain with Chiron, their scuffles and laughing taunts, clasped hands pulling each other back to their feet. All that’s missing is the sun washing golden over them and Achilles’s mortal heart beating rabbit-fast in his chest.Would it be a crime, then, to make space in his heart for another? Or should his empty chest stay always a shrine to his lost, greatest love?
Relationships: Achilles/Patroclus, Achilles/Patroclus/Zagreus (Hades Video Game), Achilles/Zagreus (Hades Video Game)
Comments: 22
Kudos: 92





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from No Reason by Tōth:  
>  _I wanna be free,  
>  I wanna believe  
> That all of my dreams  
> Keep waking up  
> And I wanna love  
> I wanna be touched  
> But softly at first_
> 
> I just finished The Song Of Achilles and I have Thoughts And Feelings about it and Hades.

Gods are strange. They seem born fully-formed, yet they are not quite...there. Zagreus, when Achilles first meets him, has the body and misplaced confidence of a man barely into his second decade, yet he is strangely innocent. He wields enormous power— Achilles can see that at a glance, the aura around the grey-skinned youth nearly palpable in its radiance— yet he does not seem to know what to do with it.

Zagreus takes to training like... well, like he was born for it. Achilles can’t remember training with someone as powerful, as agile and as bodily well-equipped for war as himself, in his previous life or this. Zagreus is beautiful, too, in that cold-marble way the gods often have, yet his personality is as warm and friendly as anyone Achilles has ever met. His honesty and propensity for kindness almost remind him of his own younger years, before Troy had turned him stone-faced and bitter.

It’s almost enough to pull Achilles out of the well of grief he wallows in whenever he is not engaged in his duties to Lord Hades. There is comfort in work— and joy in honest, physical labor— but when his body is not occupied his mind wanders. He stands at his post guarding the House and thinks, nearly shaking with it, that though Patroclus is near their souls will never touch in this place as they did on the surface.

But Patroclus is somewhere safer, somewhere getting the reward he deserves. The best of men, Achilles thinks; he had been shocked when Lord Hades had told him of Patroclus’s place in the Fields of Asphodel, banished to the eternal in-between because of a single unfortunate act of violence in his youth. Hadn’t Achilles seen Pat shake from the memory of it for years as children? Hadn’t he woken some nights to Patroclus yelling in his sleep, haunted by the empty eyes of his bully, fallen? Had the man not suffered for his mistake enough?

Each time the thoughts wash over him, Achilles shakes his head briskly. It is done; Patroclus has been given his place in Elysium, as is his rightful due. Eternity is a long time to serve a contract, but Achilles will do it if it means Pat can enjoy his reward for a life best-lived.

But Zagreus reminds him of Pat so _very_ much, is the thing: his earnestness, his open smile, even the initial clumsiness the godling displays when they first begin their training. It brings Achilles back to his and Pat’s days on the mountain with Chiron, their scuffles and laughing taunts, clasped hands pulling each other back to their feet. All that’s missing is the sun washing golden over them and Achilles’s mortal heart beating rabbit-fast in his chest.

Time passes in inscrutable portions. Shifts change, creatures of the kind Achilles had only heard of in life passing through the House’s halls like it’s just another day of work for them. And indeed it is, Achilles has to remind himself frequently. The gorgon dusts; the Furies discuss their days over lunch; even Death Incarnate has reports to submit every now and then. Zagreus grows into a more fully-developed being and takes on work of his own, and Achilles stands guard, the greatest warrior of his generation reduced to a living statue, made stiff by his own grief.

It’s what he deserves.

The years move on, day or night after day or night, indistinguishable from the next except by the markers of time Achilles learns to place in the House: shift change of those in charge of punishment of the damned resting and working; meals being prepared, and crowds moving through the lounge in waves. Even seasons begin to become recognizable by their patterns, winters being the busy season for Hypnos at the mouth of the Styx, while summer slows the flow of new souls somewhat.

Achilles stands guard, and he trains Zagreus, and slowly the open wound of his bisected heart begins to heal. It does not heal _well_ , but it scabs and calluses and eventually forms a knotted scar around the whole of it that numbs him a bit, so that thinking of Patroclus in Elysium without him, perhaps having drunk from the Lethe to forget him entirely, does not make him want to collapse into a sobbing, broken mess on the floor every single time.

Things in the House are not entirely unchanging, though.

As Zagreus matures over the decades, the godling begins to exert his own powers. It is unclear for a long while exactly what Zagreus is the god _of,_ but Achilles forms his theories from the way the boy’s blood seems to sizzle in contact with the earth, with the way his body heals wounds— with the fact that he can die and die and _die_ , and still re-emerge whole and fresh from the Styx as cheerful as ever. There is something in that pattern that gives Achilles hope; there is something in the boy that makes his callused heart attempt to wriggle in his chest.

He begins to wonder if he could make something new for himself here. Zagreus has always been handsome and kind and interested in Achilles; it is not new to be desired, but it is new to want someone besides his beloved that way. For so long Achilles had Patroclus and needed no other in his life or in his bed; now he wonders if he has Patroclus still, or if he has been forgotten. Perhaps Patroclus has purposefully wiped away his memory, and now Achilles’s pain is the only pitiful remnant of their brief time together on earth.

Would it be a crime, then, to make space in his heart for another? Or should his empty chest stay always a shrine to his lost, greatest love?

He is just starting to wonder these things in earnest when Zagreus shocks the entire staff and tries to leave the House for the first time.

And then he does it again.

And again.

And again and again and _again._

And then he brings news of Patroclus, and the muscle Achilles once though surely withered to an atrophied husk in his chest quivers and then beats and then does not _stop_ beating, thumping so hard and fast that even though, as a shade, he does not _need_ to breathe, he finds he is quite lightheaded and his limbs suddenly weak.

He puts it out of his mind. There is nothing to do, no way around his contract. No matter how much he wishes to go to his _philtatos_ , his most beloved, most _trusted_ companion, _his Patroclus—_

There is nothing to be done.

And time moves on, with only the exquisite pain burning a hole in Achilles’s chest every moment of his afterlife.

And then those fated words, the smallest message passed through the very man Achilles had come so close to touching, the phrase that makes him stutter and straighten, breath rushing like sea-storm gasps:

_"Risk it all."_


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time moves on and things change, if not by Achilles's hand.

Someone says to Achilles, once, that Patroclus is no one.

It’s meant, somewhat, as a play on words— that Patroclus had had no name, exiled young and set adrift. Without a name, he had no history. With no history, he’s little more than a footnote in even Achilles’s great legend.

It’s a newly arrived shade who says it. It’s only an offhand comment, from one in line for sentencing from Lord Hades himself, who, having caught sight of Achilles standing guard, begins exclaiming the wonders of the tales they’d heard in the decades since Achilles’s own demise.

Unable to stop himself, Achilles carefully asks what they had heard of Patroclus’s bravery— and finds that there is a strange sourness to his lover’s memory on the surface: that Patroclus was Achilles’s duty-bound slave, sent out in his armor as a sacrifice only to fail in his given task.

Achilles is infuriated. It is true that Patroclus was more mortal in the end than Achilles had ever been willing to acknowledge. But Patroclus had been so _robust_ in life— solid, heartfelt, his eyes warm and full and vibrant, even when they dimmed in mute displeasure at Achilles’s prideful pigheadedness just before the end of it all.

But the shade's comments makes him bitter, and so he turns away, tersely bidding the shade good luck in their sentencing, and then stands mute at his post, once again the estimable prize in a war of egos between the gods, and nothing more.

In life, Achilles had been regarded as a great hero; in death, he feels himself a great coward. He had given his place in Elysium to Patroclus, too afraid to ask Lord Hades to let them share it instead. And he has made a somewhat pleasant afterlife for himself in the House, this is true, but it is not— it is not _paradise_. Not without Patroclus to enjoy it with.

He wonders what Pat would make of his relationship, such as it is, with Zagreus.

Achilles cares for Zagreus. And how could he not? He has had centuries to grow to love the godling— and it _twists_ at him, to know that this close relationship blossomed over an even longer period than his own comparatively short mortal life had been with Pat, in as much as time can be measured in this strange place.

Zagreus is exactly the kind of man Achilles would have happily fought alongside, a lifetime ago. Perhaps he would have even brought up the idea of _more_ in whispered consultation with Pat, the two of them laughing under the covers in bed at night, bodies entwined tightly to eke out every scrap of contact they could.

He and Patroclus had shared others, once upon a time, and only on rare occasions. But that had been negotiated— as a unit, the two of them taking a lover into their bed together. An experience shared, always a reinforcement of their own bond. Achilles had never willingly sought out a partner on a solitary basis. He had never needed to, and never _wanted_ to before he’d died, and now feels a shard of guilt lodge in his side at his affections for the very godling that ferries messages back and forth for him and Pat.

He thinks again: would it be a crime?

But then:

“He says… _’Risk it all.’”_ Zagreus looks so _hopeful_ as he relays the message. Like he has himself been given a great reward with these words, instead of the power to shake Achilles to his core.

Can he go to Patroclus? Does he dare?

Fear is for the weak. _Fear is for the weak._ The thought rings over and over in his head in an agonizing echo. His heart, recently revived, wriggles and squirms in his chest— every bit as deeply uncomfortable as it sounds.

“I will need your help, lad,” he says at last. His voice sounds faint even to his own ears.

And of course Zagreus, good man that he is, is too happy to help. But it takes time. It takes _time,_ and quite a bit of work on Zagreus’s part, but— he’s so close. What will he say? What words could possibly make up for his selfishness, his utter foolishness, in his previous life or this one? He’s had centuries already to think about what he wants to say during their impossible reunion; none of the scenarios he’s thought of have prepared him for the agonizing reality.

Zagreus does not even seem to consider it work to bustle about attempting to gain access to Achilles’s contract. He’s so determined— and again something squirms in Achilles’s chest, this time a wriggling worm whispering that he had been so very close to failing in his devotion to Patroclus.

The worm also whispers: would it be a failure if Zagreus gave of himself freely, as the godling seems inclined to do? Could worship of one be considered a loss of faith towards another?

He thinks of his body wrapped around Patroclus’s at night, knees tucked up in parallel as they dreamed; he thinks of Pat’s hand resting, proprietary, on his ankle as they sat around the fire with their friends for meals. He thinks of the knowing look Pat would send him when the rare brave stranger sent the two of them curious, hungry glances.

 _Would_ it be a loss of faith, or a new form of worship?

Zagreus works tirelessly to find Achilles’s contract, and all Achilles can do is wait, boiling under the skin to see his beloved again.

Achilles feels it when the amendment is made to his contract. Something changes in the very makeup of his soul, that intangible string of fate tying him solely to the House severed, or at the very least slackened.

And then the glade:

Two souls in one spot.

His Patroclus, climbing to his feet, waiting for him like it was only minutes since their last desperate press of lips, not a dozen lifetimes.

Achilles had rehearsed what he would say a million times, in a million ways, a universe of apologies twisted down to a bright constellation of love and grief and guilt and adoration.

But all of it melts away when the warmth of Elysium’s soft atmosphere envelops him. It washes his stuttered apologies away like a spring melt down the side of a mountain, leaving cool, sweet relief rushing through Achilles’s mind. His heart sings, his lungs ache with the tension of a held breath, and as he steps into the grove, seeing Elysium’s verdant fields for the first time, he thinks: _This._

_This is what I fought for, and failed for, so many lifetimes ago._

“Achilles...”

Patroclus’s strong, long-fingered hand reaching for him. His beloved’s loam-dark eyes, shimmering wet with fears unspoken, now seen dispersed. His lips, turning up in a smile at once desperately yearning and heartachingly fragile.

Two souls in one spot.

Achilles feels radiant, like he is made of spun sunlight, the tapestry of his soul complete at last with this final weaving. He holds Patroclus’s face in his own trembling hands. It doesn’t feel real. Even the shadows of Tartarus, Achilles thinks, would be banished in this tremulous light.

The glade is silent, but for the trickling waters of the Lethe and their own breaths rushing in wonderment as they touch for the first time since death. Achilles’s breath comes easily for the first time in a millennia, the sigh over his lips soft as dandelion down and just as light.

Two souls, one spot.

And they simply _are._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> was that a reference to TSOA and the "hundred gold urns pouring out the sun" ??? yeah maybe what of it


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After their reunion, Achilles and Pat have a lot to talk about.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is inspired once again by lyrics from No Reason by Toth, the same song this fic's title is from. 
> 
> _You've been here before  
>  You opened the door  
> You walked straight on through  
> There's nothing to do  
> And nothing is wrong  
> If nothing is right  
> We're happy now and  
> Yes we practice magic_

Marking the strange passage of time in the underworld gets no easier once Achilles is allowed access to Elysium. Time seems even more stagnant in the verdant fields of eternal paradise. There’s no sun to tell the days, no moon to count the nights, no stars to catch the shifting of the years rolling by. There’s only Ixion’s grimly-sourced light making an eternal twilight-dawn, the brightest and softest of the greens and blues at once.

It’s not just time that is strange and stagnant: the shades themselves seem to be stuck in a perpetual cycle of plundering glory; many are mere memories of themselves at this point, souls having relived their finest glories over and over until they fade into a memory of a memory. Their features fade with them, too, until they are only vaguely distinguishable from one another under the hoods of their cloaks.

Achilles wonders if he will fade that much, given enough time. He supposes it’s inevitable. He wonders— with a small, grinding bit of fear in his jaw— if that time will come sooner now that his tie to the House has been slackened.

He shakes off the thought when it comes; he still has purpose, even without a strict contract. He has a job to do at some times and an afterlife to explore at others, and that should be enough to last him a good long while.

They have a lot to talk about, him and Patroclus. Though their first meeting here in the Fields was all but silent, the words do come eventually. Apologies first: Achilles for being too stubborn, too proud, to fight when he should have. For drawing out a war in which thousands died, many at his own hand, rather than meet his destiny on his own terms.

He apologizes, too, for his absence here. He had thought his deal with Hades would have made up for his failures in life, but now he sees that it was yet another note in a long list of shortcomings. His self-ordained sacrifice was at once too much, and too little, misplaced guilt and his stubborn assumption that he knew what was best for both of them leading to a failure in all respects.

Patroclus also has apologies he insists on making, though Achilles feels they are more understandable than his own: Pat apologizes for becoming bitter here, for thinking Achilles to have discarded him, for leaving their last embrace with fear and anger in his heart. They are small things, or so Achilles thinks at first, but then Patroclus enunciates the details of the centuries gone by in solitude here in this broken grove, taking oblivion by small sips of the Lethe, and Achilles begins to see fully the shroud of guilt that Patroclus wears, sewn by his own hands.

They will have to lift it together.

Pat’s sips of the Lethe have washed away some memories— and discovering exactly which ones makes Achilles’s heart ache, fragile and tender. Pat remembers the night sky’s endless cast above them at mount Pelion— but not all the constellations they had made up their own stories for. He remembers dour meals shared around the fire, going over plans for the next day— but not the spitting of olive pits at each other between fits of laughter, a brief respite from the grim reality of the sounds of war around them.

But they have time, and some of the memories, they think, can be revived or recreated. And so they sit by the waters of the Lethe, feet dangling over its foggy depths but not quite breaching its surface, and talk and talk and talk until Achilles thinks that his voice, should they have been mortal, would have become hoarse and small.

After the mortal past comes the unalive present. Achilles recounts the last few centuries as much as he can. It is hard not to skate past the worst of his early broken years under Lord Hades, but they have always been honest with each other, and so Achilles pushes through and says, in grave detail, just how he had made his afterlife livable in Pat’s absence. He talks of his post, watching new shades arrive; he talks of his occasional breaks, chatting with the Fury Megaera and even actual gods over drinks and plates of fried food; and of course he talks of Zagreus.

He does not bring up his romantic feelings for the godling directly; even with brutal honesty on his pate, he cannot quite bring himself to say exactly what he feels for Zagreus.

But Pat is perceptive. And perhaps, he hints, Achilles is not alone in his appreciation. Achilles does not have to tell Pat of Zagreus’s kindness, his humor, his need to help others. He does not need to espouse his skill in battle (“And I wonder how he got to good with that spear?” Pat says, teasing.) or his quick mind, able to learn new skills as easily as a fish learns to swim.

He does not need to say, directly, that the way the braziers’ flames glint off Zagreus’s flexing back muscles makes him ache for contact; he does not have to admit to how often he stares at Zagreus’s eyes, the one jewel-bright, the other a glowing ember in the void of night. He does not need to say, out loud, how often he wonders what it would be like to hold an actual god in his bed, welcoming and solid and desperately alive, the heat of him inexhaustible.

He does not need to say it, because Pat knows.

Teases him, even. Lovingly, but devastatingly dry, Patroclus manages to at once validate Achilles’s attraction and almost void the guilt that comes with it.

They had each other; that would not change. But acceptance of one person’s love did not necessarily mean the exclusion of another’s.

After hours of circular conversation about it, Pat takes Achilles’s face in his hands, looks at him with laughter sparkling in his eyes, and says point-blank: “I have seen Zagreus; I have eyes, do I not? I know his charms.”

And when that is not clear enough for Achilles’s buzzing, startled mind, he continues: “I would not be opposed—” His mouth twists in amusement. “Let me clarify. I would enjoy knowing Zagreus as you do. He has been kind to me and to us, and he is hard to not feel affection for. It would bring me joy to know you have seen and fulfilled that which has made you ache for so long. Those few years in our youth in which I loved you and could not have you were painful enough— must we carry on that foolish mortal tradition of heartbreak even here? What use would it serve?”

It would serve as a fitting punishment, Achilles does not say. To be whole and rotten at once would be a torture twisted enough to be divine in origin.

Yet Achilles cannot bring himself to take the final step, even with Pat’s approval. He thinks of reaching out, putting his own ghostly hand on Zagreus’s live one, and shudders a little, a zap of something like lightning running phantom down his spine.

The feeling— or at least the negative connotations of it— does not seem reciprocated. Zagreus is as bright as ever, if anything even _more_ blisteringly friendly than before, overjoyed at seeing him and Pat reunited. He seems to have gotten over Achilles’s prior rejection— though Pat teases, in the privacy of their own glade, that the man’s eyes still watching him longingly— and instead has put all his cheer into providing them with a literal honeymoon in the form of more nectar than they know what to do with.

They sample it, and it is sweet— like honey wine, like a first kiss with a first love. Pat and Achilles sip it slowly, trading tastes in lingering, passionate exchanges, and for the first time, Achilles tentatively feels like he has finally settled into the Paradise he’s been allotted.

It’s Pat who suggests that they invite Zagreus to enjoy the next bottle with them, his gaze sly. They are lying in bed in the aftermath of one such exchange when he says it, in the small cottage Elysium has conjured up for them. They are tucked up in parallel curves so close that Achilles thinks their souls should merge if they were any closer— but at Pat’s words Achilles feels his body freeze sharply, caught like a rabbit in a snare.

He wants to run. Even now, even with permission to live with his mistakes and feel his love, something ravenous and mean nips at him that says it must all be a trick from some vengeful god.

But then he stops, mouth twisting in uncertainty. He thinks: _I have lived, and died, and now I live, in a fashion, once more. Have I learned anything at all, in the stretching centuries so generously given to me?_

He thinks of Zagreus’s lingering eyes and warm hands and bright teeth split in a sharp-toothed grin as he greets Achilles day or night after day or night, always glad to take the extra risk just for the smallest benefit of others.

He thinks of Pat, warm at his side once more, greeting Zagreus as the god fights through Elysium on his own quest to see his mother and the surface. Each time Pat helps as much as he is able, passing on a kiss of his own in a fashion, his appreciation and affection rolled into what he considers a small gesture.

He thinks: _Fear is for the weak._

Pat smiles at him with the faintest hint of worry shaping his full lips, as if sensing the anxious thoughts flitting through the night of Achilles’s mind like sizzling shooting stars. He takes Achilles’s hand and lifts it to his lips, his dark eyes soft as he holds Achilles’s metaphorical heart in his hands. Pat always was the braver of the two of them, in the end.

He thinks: _Risk it all._

And so he kisses Pat softly, turning over his encouragement in his mind until he comes to a satisfactory conclusion, and eventually makes his way back to the House for a new, terrifying future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like to think that during this angstfest zag is just like "damn 👀 what a MILF (Mentor I'd Like to Fuck)" and pat is like. Idly, amusedly wondering if Achilles has hit that yet

**Author's Note:**

> I'm working more on this one between commissions, so it may not be up SUPER fast...but if you want to see WIPs or whatever else I'm working on, come follow me on [Twitter!](twitter.com/GoInterrobang)


End file.
